It feels like it has been ages since the WordPress community has had a call for testing Full Site Editing (FSE) features.

I missed these calls for testing too (and your always awesome responses) even though I run the program :D. I’m excited to have them rolling again. I’ll note that this “break” in calls for testing were intentional so I could help bust out some end user docs ahead of 5.8, redirect attention to overall 5.8 testing, and move cross country (gotta take a break from time to time):

https://make.wordpress.org/test/2021/06/09/upcoming-fse-outreach-program-schedule-june-july/

I am a fan of this take on testing, and program lead Anne McCarthy seems to favor doing more of it in the future.

A big YES to this. It was really awesome to work with Blake on the idea and to come up with a use case that could possibly bring in folks to the outreach program who might not otherwise venture there just yet. My DMs are open (@annezazu in WordPress.org slack). As always you’re welcome to share in the main #fse-outreach-experiment channel or on any of the testing posts. Just don’t send any smoke signals as I likely won’t get them ;)

Using the Navigation block still seems the most troublesome area of site editing.

Agreed - it’s still an experience to refine both for creating mega menus and for creating even a simple menu. When it was made clear that it wasn’t going to make the 5.8 cut, it became an obvious area to focus a call for testing on as soon as I could swing it.

To add an actual link, users must first add the Page Link block. Then, they can search for a specific page. This two-step process gets me every time.

This gets me nearly every time too :D. Just this week, an overview issue was shared around what can be done to improve this as for 80-90% of use cases, folks won’t need to add a ton of additional blocks to a menu:

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/34041

I’m keen to see this evolve as currently having each block weighted equally when the quick inserter is pulled up with the navigation block makes for a confusing (and repetitive) experience.

The “space between items” option also failed to work with the Navigation block, ruining one of the early design ideas I had.

Reported here after some testing on my end: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/34056 Great find.

Using right-alignment with the Search block did not work. Therefore, I used the 100% width option to align it with my right-aligned nav menu.

Does this match your experience? https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/31517

No amount of tricks or rearrangement of blocks seemed to remove that space, and I simply could not live with that.

I wasn’t quite sure where this should live so, for now, reported it in the theme experiments repo for the TT1 Blocks theme crew: https://github.com/WordPress/theme-experiments/issues/283 It might need to hang out in the Gutenberg repo but I’ll be sure to follow up either way. I’ve seen this phenomenon previously and, usually it’s chalked up to needing more spacing tools, but I wanted to be sure to track this down.

As always, thank you for taking the test further with your own approach and even your own theme this time! I especially enjoyed your feedback on having more community calls for testing. I know we’ve often gone back and forth around the features themselves rather than the program but know I’m open to feedback on both and am trying to think about what can be learned from this current effort to inform future outreach programs: https://nomad.blog/2021/06/11/on-future-outreach-program-models-in-the-wordpress-community/